ABSTRACT
Forecasting is a very important and essential tool for the strategic decision-making process in a business. It predicts various scenarios based on the previous period’s inputs and certain assumptions. Let’s assume a business wants to know the demand for its products in the coming quarters. This is a very important input for businesses to plan their production and capacity utilization. Forecasting helps in analyzing this situation by predicting future demand for the product based on the previous year’s figures. Forecasting can be defined as a ‘techniques which predicts the future trends by using historical data as an input. It will also make certain assumptions based on the current situations like inputs from market research conducted, prevailing GDP growth rate, change in government policies, tax rates, competitors, and so on. The present chapter deals with different techniques of forecasting to estimate or predict the sales of the company. Forecasting techniques that are been discussed in this chapter include correlation, simple regression, multiple regression analysis, and moving average (MA) methods.
